by Holland, Tom
True, there was in all this a steely measure of calculation. The Poles were valuable allies in the struggle against the Wends. That Otto retained his hard-edged streak of pragmatism was evident from the presence in his train, even as he prayed by Adalbert’s tomb, of hostages from Italy. Yet pragmatism, in the shadow of the end time, could go only so far. Dimensions infinitely beyond that of the earthly present were also in play: the threads of history, woven according to God’s plan throughout the centuries, were on the verge of being gathered up and placed into Otto’s hands. Or so Otto himself appears devoutly to have believed. It is certainly hard to explain otherwise why, after an absence from his homeland of many months, with his nobility fractious and his countrymen resentful of all their emperor’s foreign adventuring, his principal concern should have been to consult, not with the living, but with the dead.
By late April, barely a month after leaving Gniezno, and having toured Saxony at a blistering speed, Otto was in Aachen: site of the tomb of Charlemagne. On Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit, descending upon the earliest disciples, had imbued them with the fire of an unearthly wisdom – he and three companions passed down into the opened crypt. There, within its tenebrous depths, they supposedly found Charlemagne sitting as though asleep, a golden crown on his head, a sceptre in his gloved hands; ‘and the fingernails had penetrated through the gloves, and were sticking out’. Otto, having first knelt in homage before his great predecessor, next ordered the corpse to be clothed in white robes, those very garments which, at the end of time, in the great battle with Antichrist and all his cohorts, would be worn by ‘the armies of heaven’. Then, re-emerging from the darkness of the underworld into the light of day, he prepared to move on again: not to Saxony, but back to Italy. Well might his countrymen have felt themselves snubbed and undervalued. As one chronicler phrased it with diplomatic understatement: ‘the Emperor’s doings received a somewhat mixed reaction’.
Otto himself was not oblivious to the mutterings. He knew that many of his actions were bound to strike his subjects as bizarre, or even unsettling. That, however, could not be helped. The mission with which he believed himself charged by God was hardly one that he could parade. Already, however, to those in the know, the proofs of its success must have appeared manifest. Day by day, month by month, ‘the one thousandth year since the Incarnation was being completed happily’ – and Antichrist had not appeared. That did not mean, however, that Otto could afford to let slip his guard. Just the opposite. Christ’s life had contained many significant moments – and who was to say from which of them the one thousand years, after which Satan was to be loosed from his prison, were properly to be measured? Already, as the new year of 1001 dawned, there came a sobering reminder that the forces of darkness were very far from spent. The Romans, whom their emperor had ‘loved and cherished above all’, were reported to have risen in revolt. Otto immediately hurried to the ancient city. Only a full-scale onslaught by his soldiers, and the unveiling of the Holy Lance, ‘glinting terribly’ in the hands of the bishop who wielded it, served to quell the insurrection. Despite being stunned by the Romans’ ingratitude, and besieged by their repentant tears, Otto did not permit his devotion to the city to override his strategic judgement: a full-scale withdrawal was ordered to Ravenna. From here, now menacing his foes, now mollifying them, he continued to display his customary political acuity. Although Rome herself remained too unsettled to serve him as his capital, he knew that she would not defy him for long. In the autumn of 1001, he dispatched orders to East Francia, summoning fresh troops. They were to be with him by late January. Passing the winter in Lombardy, the emperor could rest confident that not only Rome but all of Italy would soon be his.
And perhaps even more as well. Otto’s efforts in the millennial year to buttress the Roman Empire had self-evidently been sufficient to keep Antichrist at bay; but there was much still left to be done. All his labours notwithstanding, Christendom remained divided. Accordingly, in the summer of 1001, Otto had dispatched a second embassy to Constantinople, led by a bishop more trustworthy than Philagathos – and this time his demand for a princess had been met.
Indeed, it was reported that she was already on her way, and could be expected, like Otto’s reinforcements, come the spring: the two halves of the Roman Empire seemed on the verge of being joined at last. Even that prospect, however, giddy though it was, seems barely to have satisfied the young emperor. For what if there were a still greater and yet more terrible destiny awaiting him, one prophesied for many centuries and fated to convulse all the universe? Confirmation of his suspicions, in that year of 1001, seemed to lie right on his doorstep.
Beyond the great palaces and churches of Ravenna, those monuments to long-dead Christian emperors, there stretched a pestiferous wasteland of salt marshes and mudflats, all stagnancy and whining insects, unutterably desolate. Not wholly so, however: for occasionally, amid the bleakness, there might be glimpsed a makeshift shack. In each one of these, barefoot and unkempt, there lived a hermit; and among them, on a remote and boggy island, was their leader, the most renowned saint in all Italy. The name of Romuald was one to put even Nilus’s in the shade. Holiness was manifest in the very appearance of his skin, which had turned hairless and bright green, ‘like a newt’s’, following an extended immersion in a swamp. On those rare occasions when the saint did deign to clean himself, his dirty bathwater, it was reported, could heal the sick. One group of villagers, on discovering that he was planning to move on from their neighbourhood, had even plotted to murder him and saw his body up into relics, such was his reputation as a miracle-worker. Spared dismemberment by pretending to be mad, Romuald had survived and flourished, to become a living model of sanctity. No wonder, then, that Otto should often have made the journey out into the marshes beyond Ravenna. These trips, however, were not mere spiritual tourism. The emperor, as he pondered the future, had a particular reason to consult with the saint. Both men, despite all the immeasurable differences in their station, were embarked upon a matching quest. Both shared the passionate conviction that the Second Coming was imminent; and both had resolved to meet it by leaving as little as possible for the returning Christ to condemn.
‘For who is not terrified,’ as one of Romuald’s disciples would later put it, ‘who is not shaken to his very roots, by that statement of the Lord Himself in the Gospel: “Like lightning flashes from the east as far as the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” The way of life established by Romuald at Ravenna was a consciously heroic effort to keep this dread of judgement at bay. An existence of implacable and excruciating deprivation, whether lived in a swamp, or in the depths of a forest, or bricked up in a cell, with nothing for company save for birds and the vermin that swarm and feed on rags: such, argued the saint, was the only serviceable preparation for the end of days. Here was a conviction with which his imperial visitor had evidently expressed great sympathy: for one of Romuald’s companions, after Otto had left them for the last time, turned and asked his master in perplexity, ‘What has happened to the King’s noble resolution, the promise he confided secretly to Christ, to become like one of us?’ But it is evident too that Otto’s vow, however he may precisely have phrased it, had been misunderstood. Not for the emperor a shack in a swamp. Instead, he had revealed to Romuald, it was his intention to travel to Jerusalem, and there to lay down ‘the badge’ of his royalty: his earthly crown. ‘For after three years, during which I will set right all that is wrong in my empire, I will abdicate my kingship. And I will offer it instead to one who is better than me.’ Romuald’s followers may have failed to grasp whom their visitor had meant by this — but Romuald surely knew.
The king to whom Otto intended to hand his crown was Christ. The world once readied for the hour of judgement, the emperor would climb the hill of Golgotha, and kneel, and commit his soul to God; and thereby usher in the end of days. Romuald, by granting Otto his blessing, had shown that he, like Nilus, approved of this intention. He had s
hown that he believed himself in the presence of the last Roman emperor.
But all his hopes, and those of Otto himself, were to be dashed. When the emperor, early in 1002, began his advance on Rome, the venerable hermit was by his side. As the expedition headed southwards, however, a giant dragon was spotted overhead, glittering brightly in the winter sky. Everyone who saw it knew it for a certain portent of doom. Sure enough, soon afterwards, Otto fell sick of malaria – and by late January he was dead. Many plans, many dreams perished with him. The reinforcements summoned from East Francia had been only a single day’s march away as their emperor breathed his last. The princess sent from Constantinople to serve as Otto’s bride had no sooner landed than she was being sent back home again. The new King of Saxony had no time for fantasies of global rule. For Henry, Duke of Bavaria, son of ‘the Quarreller’ and grandson of the Henry who had schemed so tirelessly to steal the crown from Otto I, it was sufficient that one of his line had the rule of the Reich at last. Not until then would he finally succeed in battling his way south to Rome, and his coronation as emperor; and when he did so, there would be no Pope Sylvester waiting for him there with brilliant talk of renovatio.
Gerbert, who had loyally followed Otto to Ravenna, had returned to the Lateran following his patron’s death; and there, in May 1003, after a miserable year of being bullied by the resurgent Crescentius family, he too had died. It had not taken long for his extraordinary story to be transmuted into myth. That a peasant -- still more a non- Italian peasant --should have risen to hold the office of pope appeared to most too remarkable to credit to mere human agency. So it was that Gerbert of Aurillac, ‘the philosophical pope’, who had devoted the last years of his life to buttressing the Roman Empire, would be remembered, not for all his labours in the cause of learning and of Christendom, but as a thing of Antichrist, a beast, ‘risen up from the abyss shortly after the completion of a thousand years’.”
‘Caesar is gone. And with him gone, all future ages arc thrown into confusion.’ This epitaph, composed in the confused months that followed Otto’s death, was not, perhaps, a wholly exaggerated one. A tipping point had indeed been reached: the dream of universal empire as a solution to the world’s problems, for all that it might still animate the chanceries of Baghdad and Constantinople, would never again, as a practical policy, serve to motivate a monarch of Latin Christendom.
‘Like one of the pagan kings of ancient times, he struggled to resurrect the glories of Rome, that city with its deep-buried foundations — but in vain.’” So it would be remembered of Otto. None of his successors would follow his example. His dreams had been too dazzling-and his failure too total as well. Although he never did make it to Jerusalem, and although he never did surrender his crown into the hands of Christ, Otto would prove to have died as what he had long imagined himself to be: the last Roman emperor.
3
... YIELDING PLACE TO NEW
The Beginning of the Birth-pangs
Eight years before the one-thousandth anniversary of the Incarnation, in 992, an old man robed in black tottered up the gangplank of a ship bound for Jerusalem. Adso, who had long since stepped down from the abbacy of Montier-en-Der, was by now in his eighties, and perilously frail to be making such a voyage. The rigours of life at sea were notorious – and sure enough, no sooner had the voyage begun than the aged monk was sickening. Five days later, and he was dead. Father Adso would never tread the Holy Land.
But why, at such a venerable age, had the great scholar been travelling there in the first place? ‘He will come to Jerusalem’: so Adso had written long previously, in his celebrated discourse on the career of Antichrist. For it was there, on the Mount of Olives, ‘in the place opposite to where the Lord ascended to heaven’, that the climactic battle against the Son of Perdition would be fought; ‘and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth’. No mortal could know for certain when this cosmos-changing event was to take place; and Adso, in his concern to emphasise this point, had famously reassured the Queen of the Western Franks that Antichrist would not appear for so long as her husband’s family — the Carolingians, the dynasty of
France in the year 1000
Charlemagne – remained in power. But times had changed. No sooner had Adso completed his letter than fearsome portents of doom had begun to overtake the royal line. In 954, Louis IV, Gerberga’s husband, had clattered out through the gates of Laon, down the hill on which the royal capital stood hunched, and galloped off into the wilds that stretched beyond. There, deep in the woods, he had caught sight of a wolf and set off in hot pursuit – but alas, the creature had proved to be a demon, and the king, thrown from his horse, had suffered crippling injuries. Stretchered to a sickbed, he had soon succumbed to a loathsome disease, which had set his body to rot: ‘elephantiasis pestis’.[] Death had followed shortly afterwards.
A baneful and portentous end. ‘Cruel and savage, fit only for wild beasts’ : so it was said of the forest in which Louis IV had met with the demonic wolf. The same might well have been said of his violence- ravaged kingdom. The only realm still to be ruled by a descendant of Charlemagne was subsiding inexorably into gangsterism. As the authority of the Carolingians faded ever more into shadow, so did the realm they ruled appear ever more threatened with collapse. Of Louis himself it was said that he had owned nothing ‘but the title of royalty’; and yet the succeeding decades had proved his heirs more wraithlike still. ‘Justice slept in the hearts of kings and princes’; and increasingly, across all the assorted territories that still professed a shadowy loyalty to the King of the Western Franks, the mystique of Charlemagne’s bloodline had come to seem a phantom thing. So much so, indeed, that in 987, upon the death of Louis V, a feckless fashion obsessive nicknamed by his despairing subjects ‘the Sluggard’, the great men of West Francia had taken a fateful step. Louis, irresponsible to the last, had died childless; and so it was, at a specially convened council, that the Frankish princes had felt themselves justified in electing one of their own number to the throne.
Hugh Capet, the new king, was a man not altogether lacking the stamp of royalty: descended from a long line of war heroes, he was also, on his mother’s side, the grandson of Henry the Fowler. Nevertheless, he was no Carolingian; and the Frankish lords, by electing him, had very pointedly ignored the claims of a rival who was. Louis V’s uncle, an embittered and slippery schemer by the name of Charles, was widely loathed by his peers; but when, in 988, he had pressed his claim to the throne by going to war with Hugh, he had been able to make considerable headway, and even to seize back the royal capital. For three years, a bloody stalemate had prevailed; until, hoist by his own petard, Charles had been betrayed by a schemer even more devious and underhand than himself. Adalbero, the Bishop of Laon, was a man of ineffable hauteur, snake-like intelligence, and ‘a reputation for virtue’, as one of his fellow bishops phrased it diplomatically, ‘that was not all it might have been’. Outsmarted for once, Charles had been duly handed over to his enemies, and immured within the Capetian stronghold of Orleans. By the end of 991, he was dead. The Carolingian dynasty was now effectively extinct. A few weeks later, and Adso was taking ship for Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, proofs that the great scholar might have been correct in his calculations, and that the moment was indeed a perilous one, had not been lacking upon the broad stage of the world. In 988, in that same city of Orleans where the last Carolingian was soon to meet his end, an icon of the crucified Christ had wept ‘a river of tears’, and a wolf, appearing in the cathedral, had pulled on the bell rope with its teeth, making the bell toll. Then, one year later, a fearsome comet had blazed over Christendom. What precisely this might have portended – whether ‘famine or pestilence or war or the destruction of the earth’ – no one could tell for sure. There were many, however, who found themselves gripped by foreboding. Even those who had most prospered from the deposition of the Carolingians were not immune to a certain twitchiness.
Hugh Capet
’s eldest son, Robert, who would succeed his father in 996, was notoriously sensitive to any hint that the world might be nearing its end. ‘What does it mean?’ he would demand urgently of scholars whenever news was brought to him of some particularly menacing wonder. ‘Send me back your answer at once. Send it back by the same messenger I sent you!’ His agitation – bred, perhaps, of a not entirely easy conscience — was hardly surprising; so too the circumspection with which most scholars chose to reply. Naturally, they knew their Augustine; but they knew as well what Adso had written about the coming of Antichrist, and all that it might imply for the new dynasty. One who wrote to Robert duly advised him to summon a council, to stamp out ‘divergent opininons’, and affirm once and for all that the date of the judgement Day could not be known; but there were others who replied in more sombre terms. Unsurprisingly, it was inexplicable manifestations of blood, whether falling from the sky as rain or bubbling up from springs, which tended to elicit particularly dire warnings. Whether the imminent fracturing of things which they appeared to foretell was in turn to be interpreted as heralding Antichrist, there was no scholar bold enough to say; but there were some, in their answers, who did presume to offer hints. One, in a letter to King Robert, went so far as to echo the words of Christ Himself, when He had sat on the Mount of Olives and been asked about the ending of the world. ‘Nation will rise against nation,’ the Lord had answered, ‘and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.’”
